Month: June 2010

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. The reason? It isn’t fun to write about months of product development that end in a less-than successful soft launch.

After months of developing Weutt 1.0, we released the beta version in April and realized within about a week in that this site needed to be revamped. We pushed it hard for three weeks and learned people did not want to use it. The color scheme was gross. The interface offered way to many options and buttons to click on. One of our testers said it looked like something that “carried a virus”.

Once Eric and I saw this, we had a huge decision to make. One thing we kept noticing though from feedback is that people thought Weutt was a “great idea”. We kept hearing the word “idea” because it wasn’t a great product. It was just a demonstration how we wanted to solve the online problem of “Who wants to hang out in real life. Right now.”

So we decided to give the great idea one more shot. This time, instead of naively building what we believed to be the dream product, we used user feedback from college students to help us craft the simplest way to solve a problem. Before developing, we met with experienced product designers in the industry to help mentor us in product development and experience. We started redeveloping Weutt from scratch, leaving no evidence of the old site.

The new thing looks like a new animal. We’ve been calling it Weutt 2.0 and have now been working on it full time since the summer has started.

In the development of 2.0, we’ve focused on each problem with the first site and worked to solve it. In addition, we wanted to make this site DEAD SIMPLE. That is the theme and we believe it shines through in the new interface.

Screwing up the first time was tough, but we’re actually more excited now about Weutt than before since we’ve realized a lot of mistakes we’ve made. Weutt 1.0 was built by two excited college students as a passionate hobby. Weutt 2.0 is being built by two startup founders who failed their first iteration, but have commited to Weutt as a passionate career because we’re solving a problem college students want solved.

So get ready, because we hope everyone gives Weutt another shot. Coming soon the 2nd version of Weutt…